Valentina Escalona

A subject I like since elementary school is History, specifically Chilean History. Learning about the history of chile has always seemed super relevant and interesting to me, since we must know our past before living the present and building the future. Besides, understanding history helps us not to make the same mistakes of the past in the future. Formation of Chilean society was a course I had during this semester, this course was a combination of social anthropology and Chilean history. I learned a lot, I remembered several dates and events that I had forgotten. Before starting the course I was very excited and at the same time I felt that many of the units we were going to see were to remember my beautiful years of primary education, since in these years began my love for the history of Chile. What I value most about the course is that everything we learn, which may have happened 500 years ago, continues to have consequences and repercussions today. And we must always be ready for

Memory I decided  to major in anthropology  thinking about  a career  in social anthropology, how close I was going to be to the people, to visit people in their homes and have them tell me stories. The way  to contribute to the benefit of the world was to do reconstruccions of local, social and even national memory. In my career I realized that I could contribute more to forensic anthropology, also working with historical memory, but in a bioanthropological way, doing reconstructions of crimes against humanity (wars, dictatorships, totalitarianisms, etc) through the skeletal remains of the victims,  a very complicated element since in most cases the perpetrators of the crimes choose not to say where they hid the bodies. I do not know if bioanthropology affects the world, but I do consider that when working with the search and analysis of human skeletal remains you have to have a lot of ethics and responsibility that some anthropologists do not have.

I took this photo on October 8 when I went to the Colonial Art Museum in San Francisco, there is a great diversity of animals in this place; chickens, cats, peacocks and fish. The peacock in the photo looked at my cell phone camera and I took the photo immediately. I like this photo because of the curious look the peacock has, as if it wants to identify who are the people who are visiting its quiet space.  The interesting thing about the moment of the photo was that the peacock was the one that approached me and not the other way around, I didn't even make a sound or movement for it to approach, it approached on its own. Apparently it was a peacock sociable with humans. I am struck by how natural the animal appears, almost always in peacock photos photographers expect the peacock to open its big wings, being that the look is also something quite interesting that we should appreciate more.